Taiwan Blocks Grab's $600 Million Foodpanda Deal Over Its Ties to Uber

Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission has blocked Grab Holdings' $600 million deal to acquire foodpanda's Taiwan business from Delivery Hero, a ruling announced October 22 by commission member Shin Chih-chung. The deal, first announced in March 2026, had been expected to close in the second half of the year and would have marked Grab's ninth market and its first expansion outside Southeast Asia.

The problem was Uber, not Grab

The regulator's objection centers not on Grab itself but on Grab's relationship with Uber, which operates Uber Eats, the other dominant food delivery platform in Taiwan alongside foodpanda. Uber holds a 13.1% equity stake in Grab, a legacy of the 2018 deal in which Uber exited Southeast Asia and took shares in Grab in exchange, and Uber's own chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, sat on Grab's board until as recently as July 2026. The commission concluded that those equity ties, the overlapping board membership, and a history of business cooperation between the two companies would weaken Grab's incentive to compete aggressively against Uber Eats if it also controlled foodpanda's Taiwan operations.

A regulator that has already said no once

This is not the first time Taiwan's antitrust authority has stopped a deal for foodpanda's local business on these grounds. Uber itself tried to buy the same unit back in 2024, only to be blocked by the same commission over nearly identical competition concerns. That Grab has now run into the same wall, despite being a separate company from Uber, underscores how seriously Taiwanese regulators are treating the web of ownership and board connections linking the two ride-hailing and delivery giants, rather than treating each acquirer as a fully independent actor.

An inherited stake becomes a liability

The irony is hard to miss: the very stake Uber picked up by retreating from Southeast Asia in 2018 is now the thing standing in the way of Grab's attempt to expand beyond the region it inherited that market from Uber in. What was once a clean exit for Uber and a consolidation win for Grab has evolved into a structural tie that Taiwanese regulators view as a standing risk to competition in any market where the two companies' delivery businesses would otherwise go head to head.

What happens to the deal now

With the acquisition blocked, Delivery Hero keeps ownership of foodpanda's Taiwan business for now, and Grab's push into its first market outside Southeast Asia stalls before it even started. Whether Grab can restructure the deal, challenge the ruling, or simply walk away and look elsewhere for its first expansion beyond the region remains an open question, one that may also depend on whether Grab and Uber's shareholding relationship changes in ways that could satisfy regulators in Taiwan or other markets watching this case closely.